Ansel Co-Op

Ansel Co-Op is the organisation behind Ansel, an open-source raw photo editor for artists, forked from darktable in 2022 by Aurélien Pierre and maintained since October 2025 by Jiyoné (Guillaume Stutin). Everything under github.com/aurelienpierreeng is funded here: the editor, its documentation in 10 languages, the developer documentation at dev.ansel.photos, the website in 9 languages, and the research code around them — VirtualSecretary, LensSerious, ansel-denoise. The websites are served by GitHub Pages from a static CMS, so they cost nothing to host; what the project actually pays for is the ansel.photos domain name (30 €/year) and the AI subscriptions used for development and documentation (90 €/month plus VAT each, for two developers — 216 €/month; Anthropic declined to sponsor the project). Money given to this team is split among the people doing the work, by public takes. The ultimate goal is a co-operative in which the users actually own the project; pending that legal structure, this Liberapay team keeps the boat afloat. Everything the project makes is free and stays free: no rewards, nothing to unlock. The founder's personal work — his websites, writings, music and the repositories on his own account — is funded separately at https://aurelienpierre.com/funding.json.